In recent years, transmission type light sensitive materials have been getting increased in the demands for color prints. In general, most prints have been printed on color paper and, on the other hand, there have been increasing cases where color prints have been made on black-and-white print paper from color negative films. At newspaper publishing companies and press agencies in particular, there has shown an increasing tendency to take an advantage that a single color negative film already photographed is applied to make a color gravure and an ordinary black-and-white print, so that the frequency of making use of color negative films has rapidly been increased. Recently among the press mentioned above, there has shown a tendency to replace a manual processing of black-and-white print paper with a roomlight handling type printer/processor unit so as to save the darkroom space. Accordingly, there have been demands for processing a black-and-white printing material capable of providing high-quality black-and-white prints from color negative films, which is suitable for making use of a printer/processor unit.
The tendencies of the recent printer/processor units include, for example, an essential factor that the latitude against pressure troubles is to be high in the tide of making further advances of high speed processing operations and, therefore, a light sensitive printing material has been so demanded that any image quality may not seriously be affected by the troubles such as undesirable sensitization, fog or desensitization produced by some slight damage produced in a printer/processor unit. It is also essential that any speeds or contrasts is not to be varied while a raw test sample is preserved for aging so that the printing conditions having once been set up should not be necessary to be changed and, therefore, a light sensitive material having an excellent storage stability has been demanded.